


dreamful

by togethertheyfightcrime



Series: ghost stories [2]
Category: Black Widow (Comics), Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Brainwashing, Bucky Barnes & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Childhood Memories, Childhood Trauma, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Dreams, Dreams and Nightmares, Dreams vs. Reality, Female Protagonist, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, Healing, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Love, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Memories, Memory Loss, Natasha Romanov-centric, POV Female Character, POV Natasha Romanov, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pre-Canon, THE HUMAN CONDITION
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 00:12:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13376010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togethertheyfightcrime/pseuds/togethertheyfightcrime
Summary: Natasha, becoming human, and the memory of a dream – that she had been a child, and someone had loved her, and once they had been free.Or: Natasha Romanov, and a ghost come to life. Companion todeathless.





	dreamful

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GentleTouchGinger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GentleTouchGinger/gifts).



> This is for GentleTouchGinger, whose beautiful comments on _deathless_ still mean the world to me, and who deserved this fic far sooner. I hope I have told this story right. Thank you for keeping me writing.

Once upon a time Natalia knew a story. It was the story of a girl who was never a child, and a ghost who gave her his name. She held it, deep within herself, even as she was unmade again and again for years unnumbered. And it became her soul: that thing which let her be human, be alive.

 

* * *

 

_You could at least recognize me_. She is a child, and the Soldier teaches her to be strong. She is Natalia, and the Soldier is the only person who does not make her afraid. The Soldier says _Don’t cry, Natalia_ and he never hurts her, not ever, but they hurt him until all of James is gone again and it is her fault. 

 

( _You could at least–_ )

 

The Winter Soldier is a ghost story, but it is the other man who haunts her. The Winter Soldier was real, Natalia knew: he shot her engineer in Odessa, and the old scar on her hip burned to remember another Soviet slug.

 

(Natasha remembers the Soldier stepping over her body: the thud of his boots on either side of her then – nothing. Confirming his target’s death then in a blink, ghosting into the chaos of the port city. Leaving Natasha, his witness, a  _weapon_ , behind as if she was never there at all – as if the part of the Soldier that could comprehend her existence had been burned from him completely.)

 

The Soldier was real, but the man who might have been James? Someone who carried her, who called her a dancer and a fighter and a child, who caught her tears when she cried, who tried to escape the red rooms with her clinging to his back? 

 

( _Recognize me?_ )

 

It was the kind of dream, Natasha thought, that a child built so they could live when they had no one. _Love is for children_ – Natasha was never a child, not really, so she does not expect that she had any of _that_. She was given nothing: even her mind she made for herself. 

 

(There is nothing stronger than a widow.)

 

But it was a good dream: that there was someone who loved her, and once they were free. 

 

She could not have survived without that dream, Natasha knows. For a long while it was the only thing that kept her mind from sinking into nothingness.

 

* * *

 

_I don’t know how you did it_ , Clint told her once, after Natasha had bled and screamed and fought her way into the human race, had unmade the thing that she was until only a person, flayed and raw, remained. _I don’t know how, but goddamn, Nat. If you can beat that you can beat anything._

 

She kept the name _Natasha_ because it meant who she had become: someone whose birth was worth celebrating. Clint saw that, and loved her, simply and truly in a way Natasha had never known she could be loved. 

 

( _That isn’t true_ , her dreams would whisper, _you knew once, Natalia, don’t cry, don’t you remember, his name was J–_ )

 

Of course Clint saw her, saw everything. ( _The_ yastreb, someone in her ruin of memories is saying. _The sharpest-eyed. Didn’t I tell you, Tasha?_ ) That was why he never missed, not anything, not even the flicker of a human being still buried in the widow, the girl brought to life by a ghost so many years ago.

 

* * *

 

They take the man named Steve from ice and it feels like a story Natasha already knows. Something in the shape of a memory she once had – a ghost from out of time. 

 

Then she reads Rogers’ file, and Natasha thinks: _I don’t know anything after all_.

 

* * *

 

First there is Clint, and he would’ve been more than enough – and then Laura finds Clint, and loves all of him more openly than either of the fucked-up pair that is Clint-and-Tasha thought anyone could love one of them. From the start she’s nothing but glad to have Natasha as part of the package deal that is Clint Barton, and adores Nat with the same kind of open-eyed acceptance of who (what) Natasha that Clint has. Natasha reacts just as she did when Clint pulled this on her: which is to say, Natasha loves Laura with an all-consuming intensity that terrifies Natasha if she lets herself think about it for more than a heartbeat.

 

So of _course_ the two assholes have to go and have _kids_. They have perfect mischievous laughing innocent children who call her _Auntasha, Auntie Nat,_ take her by the hand and pull her back into their worlds over and over again even when the terror of feeling the way she does towards them has kept her away for months. 

 

_I didn’t know a human being could feel this much_ , she tells Laura when Cooper, just a baby, babbles out something that sounds like Natasha’s name. 

 

From over the baby’s head Laura gives her that _look_ , the one that makes Natasha quite seriously consider giving up spycraft and moving in to that attic room the Bartons always keep ready for her. _I’m with you there, Tasha._

 

* * *

 

Steve tells her everything about Bucky without saying a word. Bucky’s there in the space beside Steve’s body, in the half-shaped faces Steve idly sketches, in the dip of Steve’s shoulder where Bucky’s arm slung around it. They grew up all over and around each other, those two, shaping and molding one another in a give-and-take as natural as breathing, until the only way to know Steve Rogers was to know Bucky Barnes. _And vice versa_. 

 

Natasha wants to put her feet back on the dash when Steve tells her, _How about a friend_? 

 

I want you to be my friend, Steve is saying. Like some part of him knows a man named James Barnes shaped her, too. 

 

* * *

 

_How about a friend_ , Steve says. 

 

Natasha tells him: _How about_ your _friend? Your friend James Buchanan Barnes, you friend Bucky, who you love and who loves you?_

 

Natasha says, _A good person would tell you: he’s alive, I guess. He’s the Winter Soldier. If I were really a friend I’d tell you that, but I can’t. I think that I would if I could, but I can’t. I don’t know what I remember any more than he does. Maybe less. They broke him, but they_ made _me. I don’t know how to save him and that’s why I haven’t told you that he is Bucky and Bucky is alive because they hurt him so much more than they ever hurt me, and I’m hanging on to being human by the skin of my teeth sometimes._

 

Natasha says, _I think he saved me too, you know. I think remembering you kept him a person, and he was the only person I ever knew, really, and he never once hurt me and something about that made me a person too. Just a little. But the problem is that I’m not sure. They put a whole world in your head, Steve, and so much of it is lies. Sometimes I think I dreamed him – but sometimes I think he’s realer than I ever was._

 

They keep driving.

 

* * *

 

Natasha dreams the dreams of Natalia, who made the Soldier into a story. She dreams Natalia’s dream of their escape gone right, of their time on the run, of their time free. She dreams from the eyes of the Soldier.

 

They are in the wilderness. The land is vast and lonely; they could – if they were lucky – be the only people for a thousand miles.

 

_Once_ , the man who was the Soldier tells Natalia, _there was a boy with a name._ It is a night so chill and deep that every wind feels like breath upon their backs. _He had a mother too. And there was no one in the world afraid of him._

 

People tell stories: this is something James knows. He knows even less about stories than he does about himself. But what he knows, he tells the wounded girl who travels with him, the child he ransomed his own life for. Stories are something you tell children when life is too hard for them to sleep.

 

_He fought to keep people alive. Not to kill them. He had – there was another boy. A little guy. He was dying, and they held each other’s hands. They held on until the boy did not die._

 

Cold shakes Natalia more fiercely than it shakes James ( _because she is more human than you can be,_ the echo of their makers whispers to him.) They cannot set fires, not ever. Light will call their hunters to them as surely as blood calls assassins to kill. 

 

_What happened to the boy who did not die_? Natalia asks him. The gunshot wound on her left hip burns beneath its wrappings, taken from the cloth that covered James’s left arm. ( _What does metal care for the cold_ , James had said, his mouth almost twisting up again.) 

 

_He did what boys do. He became a man. He was a good man,_ says James. _I know that much._

 

Natalia watches him, stubbornly, though the grasping of weariness fights to drag her eyelids into sleep. _How do you know?_

 

It is James’s turn to take the watch. Natalia does not like it when it is his turn, because he tricks her: claims he will only let Natalia sleep a few hours, then wake her so Natalia can take her turn, but then lets her sleep until the day. The man who was the Soldier has an urge she cannot understand to guard the night while Natalia sleeps, even if it means he can never shut his own eyes. 

 

_Because I think I held him_ , James tells her. _I think we became ourselves together._

 

* * *

 

_Remember me,_ Natasha’s mind is screaming as they fight the Soldier, _remember me; if you remember me, my old dream could be real. I could have been human before they made me, someone could have loved me once. Please let it be real. Just_ recognize me, _please._

 

It’s funny, almost. (Natasha realizes this later, waiting again under hospital fluorescents as the doctors work on Steve.) Steve must think he’s alone in his great pain: that the man he loved the most can’t remember him at all. 

 

Dig deep in Steve’s great heart and there is Bucky at its core; glimpse what ghost of a soul Natasha bears and its bedrock is a man named James, who loved a child called Natalia and told her _little one, you aren’t alone, there’s more than this_. 

 

It’s funny because for all they are as unalike as two humans could be – (though neither of them are really as _human_ as most humans are) – she and Steve are twinned, almost intimately, inside of themselves now. They will both ache at their foundations until their ghost remembers them, remembers himself.

 

( _If there is anything of you for him to remember_ , Natasha chides herself. _And there won’t be, almost certainly there won’t be. Nothing you want this much could be real. The world isn’t made that way_.)

 

It isn’t funny at all, actually. Steve comes out of surgery and Natasha realizes that she doesn’t care, does she, whether or not the man they call the Winter Soldier remembers his best guy Stevie Rogers or not ( _I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t_ ) – what she wants, with the hot, selfish yearning of a child, is for James to remember her.

 

* * *

 

Time passes and Steve searches for the man he loves with a man that loves him at his side. Sam Wilson, who calls himself the Falcon. _Too many birds_ , Natasha thinks to herself. But falcons are sharp-eyed, too. He will see what Steve may not be willing to. She lets them go.

 

Time passes and Natasha dreams: raw shreds of the past she knows to be real. Strange wavering scenes of pasts she cannot quantify the truth of. Voices in the night; images flickering behind smoke, like old paintings in the firelight of cave walls. 

 

Long ago and far away from the men that made them monsters, Natalia is telling the Soldier: _Say the words_. Bands of ghostly light dance in the dark above. It is very cold here. Every breath turns to ice with a crackle and a faint flicker. _The ones that kill you_. 

 

The Soldier is lowering the rifle he holds pointed at the surrounding woods. It is his turn at watch, but James will let Natalia sleep till sunrise if the pain does not wake her. 

 

(It always wakes her – she cannot heal like he does, and they shot her, they _shot_ her, they made her and they shot her because her death was nothing to them – and it hurts, it hurts more than could ever be expressed.)

 

The cold has cut his voice to something raw. _I can’t – Natasha, why would I?_

 

_So you can come back to life again, after. So you can fight the words, because we’re away from them. So you can learn to find your mind when you aren’t you and come back from where it sends you. That way if they ever find us, you will be stronger than words_. 

 

_I could hurt you_. 

 

_No_ , says Natalia, to the ghost. _You can’t_.

 

* * *

 

Everything – as is its wont – goes to shit. 

 

The problem with being a person the balance it requires: the continual exhausting choices. Does she follow what cool, divorced analysis suggests is currently the wisest plan of restraint for this team of ridiculous, overpowered semi-humans? (They would _cheat_ , of course; Natasha doesn’t know why Steve can’t _understand_ – you nod and agree to the rules of the rule-makers, and once they look away you go on doing as you please.) Or does she follow the madness of her heartbeat saying _stop, they are as near as you can have to family and they are killing each other for nothing, stop this_! Does she follow the constant boiling irritation that says _slap Tony Stark into sense and when sensible, keep slapping_ , because somehow Stark cannot comprehend that anyone’s pain could be greater than his own? 

 

Does she listen to Natalia, small and quiet in her head, crying out: _it’s him it’s James your Soldier he’s yours, he said Natalia you are like me and that meant you were not alone and he’s here he’ll remember he’ll save you again–_

 

Everything goes to shit, too fast and too ugly for the careful, quiet reflection necessary for the balancing act of personhood. If Clint was with her, Natasha would find a way to joke about it, to make him smile – maybe she’d say _I should just get a tattoo saying ‘I’m trying my goddamn best’ on my forehead, huh_. Maybe she’d say _we’re still friends, right?_ and if he agrees she’ll think, _then at least the world will keep turning_. Maybe she’d say _tell me Laura and the kids are okay, tell me they're somewhere safe, tell me you forgive me for trying to control this shit situation and ending up on the wrong side of the fight again like I always do because I don’t know how to be a human being_ –

 

But everything keeps happening, all at once, and Stark’s roped some fucking twelve-year-old from Queens into the fight, because it’s always great to use a physically augmented child soldier to fight your battles. And then she sees a chance – to help Steve and the Soldier who does not know her at all – and it’s not a choice, not even close. There is nothing Natasha would ever do but help the ones who’ve saved her life.

 

* * *

 

Steve, as expected, breaks everyone out of prison and takes refuge with them in Wakanda. Natasha’s so proud of him she could – well. She _does_. She takes advantage of the chaos and brings Laura and the kids somewhere safe, somewhere they won’t be found.

 

(And Laura doesn’t hate her. Laura hasn’t told the kids _your Auntie Nat fought against your daddy, who saved her life; it’s Auntie Nat’s fault too that Daddy isn’t with us right now_. Laura, eyes brimming clear with honesty, just takes Natasha’s hands and thanks her.)

 

Lila’s been quiet the whole time, too quiet, and it shakes something in Natasha’s core. That bright little girl who draws butterflies and dragons in impossible colors: the world is wrong without her tiny voice. 

 

In his carseat, the baby named for Natasha cries. 

 

Cooper is taller, up to Natasha’s shoulder; but he curls his hand around her wrist and tugs like a little kid to get her attention. _Are you gonna get Dad now_? 

 

This is why they taught you not to love people, Natasha thinks. Love like this will be the thing that kills you.

 

_I got my best people on it_ , she tells him.

 

* * *

 

She dreamed of fire before she knew what dreams were. 

 

She dreams of Natalia, who dreams–

 

Wreckage from the explosion cakes the ground. Where the village isn’t burning, it’s choked with smoke: something deeper than memory in Natalia aches with a distant panic, a nightmarish sense that somehow, she’s been here before. Her ears are ringing from the bomb and the screams around her; she shoves away a thick beam of tinder that covers the cellar hole and scrambles to stand on the earth. 

 

The world drowns in running and weeping and shrieking. Terrified husks of people run thicker and wilder than the smoke. Natalia dives into the crowd, her heart hammering, fierceness turning her muscles taut. _James_ , she thinks, searching with eyes wide and stinging in the smog. She was only meant to stay hidden in the cellar while he was meeting the man who’d smuggle them over the border. _James, James–_

 

He couldn’t have died. Things like bombs don’t kill things like James and Natalia. But the bomb came from their hunters, Natalia knows this like she knows her guns, and if their hunters came for James–

 

There is no air in Natalia’s lungs. The ringing in her ears overpowers her sight, sends her reeling to the ground. Her palms and knees are scraped raw by rubble – boots kick her as a man barrels past, howling in agony for a wound he does not bear, arms stretching for someone else. She does not wait to see who he’s lost: Natalia picks herself up and _runs_ , bolting for the highest place in the village there is – the church with its spire and cross stretching to nail the heavy clouds. 

 

Before dread can choke her thoughts, Natalia skims like a spider up the wall of the church, clambering over its low roof to climb the spire – here she can _see,_ here her eyes will find James or find him taken, and if being the lone figure so high makes her a target to their hunters then _I don’t care,_ Natalia rails in her mind. The frost on the spire melts under her hot, bleeding palms as she climbs. _I don’t care, I don’t care, if they’ve taken him I don’t care any longer they can kill me this time I don’t care_ – 

 

From the ground, above the shrieks of people and the storming of fire, James’s voice screaming for her: _Natasha! Natasha! Tasha where are you–_

 

She freezes in her climbing, twists and stretches out with her feet and one hand holding her to look below – in the snow, fire glimmers on a metal arm, borne by a familiar shadow. Natalia leaps from the spire to the roof, lowers herself over the roof’s edge and drops. James catches her. Even through her ragged coat she can feel the piercing cold of his metal arm about her back. She smells smoke in the join of his neck and shoulder, feels the shuddering of breath through his chest like he ran himself half to death searching for her –

 

_Make me a child_ , Natalia begs no one. _Make me the little one he knew, the one who sang. Make me forget what I am so I can be anyone. Make me a child so I don’t have to let go._ There is a heartbeat in her chest. A pulse in James’s neck; the carotid artery, where her knives would go if he was her mission. 

 

(There are no missions.) 

 

They’re still alive. 

 

* * *

 

_I am alive,_ Natasha tells herself, _I am human, I am real, and I am alive,_ she tells herself, day after day after day after day after day after–

 

* * *

 

They are alive. They hold each other. 

 

James says something in the softest voice.

 

Then –

 

– then a shadow, bleeding out from the night, becoming a man whispering _those words_ and James stops moving and then Natalia feels the thuds as bullets burrow into James’s back, hears the whistling of tranqs embedding into his skin but cannot feel the ones in hers, can only feel herself falling away from James – see James falling from her, falling bloody and silent to the ground – the absence of arms around her, hear the screaming, she is screaming, they are dragging James away from her. They are taking James away from her. 

 

_Kill me,_ Natalia hears herself screaming. She cannot see James anymore; she cannot see anything, only feel herself being pulled across the ground. _Kill me, just kill me, don’t take him away, please don’t take him, why won’t you kill me, please please don’t take him away from me–_

 

* * *

 

_I wish they had killed me,_ Natasha told Nick, when she was learning to be human. _I wish I had never lived. Never had anything they could take from me. If they killed me they couldn’t take anything away from me, not ever again._

 

_Too late for that_ , said Nick, in the way he had. _But considering that you belong to yourself now – you want to do something about it_?

 

So she did.

 

* * *

 

The Winter Soldier is buried in ice. 

 

In Wakanda, Bucky Barnes is buried in ice, while all the king’s doctors learn how to mend what they can mend in his mind. 

 

Natasha brings Clint’s family to him, and does not leave. She waits. She waits with Steve as Bucky, as James, is unfrozen but kept sedated, carried to the care of what may be the greatest doctors in all the world, and what they cannot save of his mind could never have been saved at all. 

 

They do not talk, her and Steve, but – maybe, thinks Natasha. Maybe soon. If Bucky can remember his life with Steve. If James can remember his time with her. Maybe she can talk with her friend, Steve.

 

The king himself sends for them when Bucky is awoken from his induced coma and all the tests indicate he is conscious and sane. 

 

_Does he–_ asked Steve, breathless. Natasha knows the feeling.

 

T’Challa smiled at them. _Go and see_.

 

She trails after Steve into the hospital room, and feels like an intrusion. Waves of words are pouring from Steve and Bucky, and Steve is crying, Bucky too, their hands clasped, and she should leave – none of this belongs to her, James does not belong to her, she should have let him go long ago –

 

A voice from behind her, as she’s turned to flee. The voice of the man that saved her life, the man that gave her his name, that taught her what it was to be alive. His voice shaking with a joy Natasha never dreamed she could feel. He is grinning at her.

 

_Hey, Natalia – Natasha, Tasha, hey. You could at least recognize me_. 

 

* * *

 

Once upon a time Natasha told a story. It was the story of a girl who was more than a child, and the man who taught her what it is to love. They found each other, and they saved each other, and now, together, they are free.


End file.
